Theological material : food and clothing, the church, and the freedom of God.

This dissertation engages the Christian church’s ambivalence about the theological value of material, its lingering inclination to turn from “matter” to “spirit” to find the real substance of God’s concerns. Christians who seek this material elsewhere have little cause to find it in their own everyday relationships, even when these devalue and degrade (unmatter) the material lives on which they depend. I consider in particular the food and clothing networks essential to the church’s material life in the United States, outlining the economic, social, and political agreements that incline these networks to serve growth and profit at the cost of sacrificing the poor and the earth. These largely empirical descriptions also press the question of material’s significance within Christian theology, and particularly within a tradition of ecclesial-theological retrieval represented by Stanley Hauerwas. I engage Hauerwas and related discourses (the ecclesial economics of William Cavanaugh and D. Stephen Long and the agrarian theologies of Norman Wirzba and Ellen Davis) to ask how the church might make room for the meaningfulness of material creatures and relationships within its own unapologetic ecclesial speech. Even amid the material commitments of these theologians, I suggest habits that could dispose them to devalue material things: to attend to them in order to discern the “real” theological material (narratives and character formation) that lies beneath, or to absorb concern for the material implications of Christian performances into concern for the formation of Christians themselves. Finally, this dissertation identifies theological and practical resources that can help the church orient itself according to the material commitments of the Triune God. I outline a Christian theological materiality in conversation with Gustavo Gutiérrez, whose theology of God’s option for the poor invites the church into deep communion in the divine life, and thus into free and loving accompaniment of the devalued neighbor. I suggest practical directions for the church’s discipleship amid food and clothing networks, describing the deepening of its roots in the company of the Lord and its resilient neighbors and the widening of its witness to the God who redeems the poor and all creation from death.